The Endless Line

Jan Tumlir’s The Endless Line supplies us with a general theory of gesture alongside a complementary theory of aesthetics, which together look to history and the future, reconciling the thoughts of such figures as Immanuel Kant and Clement Greenberg, on one end, with those of André Leroi-Gourhan and Gilbert Simondon, on the other. Along the way, philosophical musings on the nature and purpose of art are correlated with the realities of our contemporary technocratic condition. A crucial insight of this book is that gestures bridge the gap between the human and nonhuman spheres.

The conventional progression of figuration is here insistently problematized. Tumlir demonstrates that gestures do not have clean edges and cannot be reduced to purely subjective constructs. Rather, they are forms of expression that emerge from individual interiors only to receive the imprint of their worldly surroundings. From this perspective, the gestures that take shape within painting, a central concern of this work, cannot be confined to the medium; they travel between a wide range of media. The author argues this point by mapping aesthetic philosophy onto the social sciences, covering linguistics, information theory, media studies, and cybernetics. Tumlir’s ambitious book tracks forward and backward through time, consistently alighting on the most emblematic gesture of all: that of searching. [publisher's note]